Spinning Colour Wheel of Death

[Barry N]

Couple of Questions......

1. What exactly causes this ?

2. How do you get rid of it,without having to power down and power up ?

Thanks

 

[TEG]

The "Beachball" as it is often called, is an equivalent of the hourglass in Windows. It basically means that the system is very busy or the app you are currently using has no CPU access. If it lasts for more than a minute, it is likely that the app is being starved, and may never get access to the CPU again. If you don't want to wait, restart. Otherwise, if you can change apps, find another one and close it, that may free up the CPU enough to allow your app to work correctly.

This is all due to developers not creating a good way to prevent these problems, due mainly to the system cost, considering this is "rare" to occur.

If it happens often, consider reseating your ram, reparing permissions, and maybe reinstalling the application in question.

TEG

 

[Barry N]

Thanks TEG for the info. I had a suspicion that's what was happening.

 

[PeaceOut]

what about when it happens upon wake from sleep? you get a black screen with the wheel just spinning and spinning (no login window). I actually let it sit for about an hour and nothing happened. I also tried closing the screen to put it back to sleep and bring it back. Nothing works, except to hard-reset.

I wouldn't say "rare" as it has happened to me twice since I bought the machine a couple months ago.
Once, I had a bunch of apps open when i put it to sleep and the second time, it had itunes, firefox, pathfinder, and safari and it did it.

What happen to buy a mac, it "never" crashes?